Opublikowane | Published

This article aims to investigate factors that influence the time needed for young people to find their first job. Using data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a Cox proportional hazard model was estimated for all respondents and for five subgroups of respondents coming from countries with similar labor markets. The results for all the respondents show that factors influencing the time needed for young people to find their first job are in line with the literature. In the case of the five subgroups, there are significant differences between countries in terms of these factors. It seems that, in order to shorten the time needed for young people to find their first job, measures from labor markets with similar characteristics, where similar factors influence the process of people searching for work, should be applied. However, one should bear in mind that this process of “copying” may not be completely successful.

An important feature of the reallocation process that took place in Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries was the decline in public sector employment due to the collapse of state-owned enterprises combined with an increase in private sector employment as new private firms emerged and old public companies were privatized. We propose a theoretical, parsimonious model which combines this feature with the standard search and matching model introduced by Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides. Using numerical simulation we show that faster transition (associated with faster restructuring of state-owned enterprises into more productive private firms) leads to a quicker convergence to the post-transitional equilibrium characterized by high GDP and high employment in the private sector. However, this comes at the cost of negative output growth and higher unemployment in the short run.

Two main features of the reallocation process that took place in Eastern European and Former Soviet Union countries should be distinguished. The first feature was the decline in public sector employment as a result of the collapse of state-owned enterprises, linked with an increase in private sector employment as new private firms emerged and old public companies were privatized. The second feature was, and still is, the reallocation of labor from manufacturing to the service sector. Data from the Polish Labor Force Survey for the period 1995–2015 were used to construct measures of worker flows, gross and net, and their cyclical properties were used as a way to test the predictions of structural change and transition theories. It was found that labor market adjustments tend to amplify in upturns of the business cycle, while worker flows contribute only a fraction to the changing structure of employment. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Since about 40 years the Laffer curve is used to investigate tax evasion in different ways and with different results. In this paper we present, using a critical literature review, the main considerations related to the Laffer curve starting from historically oldest theoretical models and empirical studies, through direct empirical estimations of the Laffer curve to, widely used nowadays, general equilibrium models, in particular endogenous growth models. We show, by discussing the advantages and drawbacks of these approaches, their different usefulness in studying tax evasion. We conclude that currently endogenous growth models, particularly DSGE models, provide an appropriate approach for the analysis of tax evasion using the Laffer curve.